The seminal ceremonial magician Pascal Beverly Randolph has born this date in 1825. Among his many achievements was pioneering “active mediumship,” meaning deliberate, controlled, conscious communication with discarnate entities. HIs teaching on sex magick align quite nicely with those put forward decades later by Aleister Crowley and occult scholars have theorized that the latter did encounter Randolph’s writings on the subject which were circulated among European mages of that epoch. One relatively recent bio starts:
The influential 19th century spiritualist and author Paschal Beverly Randolph was born October 8, 1825 in New York City. According to contemporary researchers he was likely the illegitimate son of William Randon, a white man, and Flora Clark, an African American woman. Soon abandoned by his father and the untimely death of his mother left him having to survive as best he could as a boy on the streets of the city’s notorious Five Points slum district. He essentially taught himself to read and write. He also worked as a bootblack, a dyer, a barber, and a ship’s cabin boy and deckhand.
By his early twenties, Randolph, attracted to the revival of occultism, began crystallizing his own thoughts on spiritualism and the occult. He married an African American woman known as Mary Jane, with whom he had three children, and then married Kate Corson, an Irish American woman with whom he had three children. The large family complicated his quest for financial security. Moreover, he was quite sensitive to the fact that his light brown skin limited his professional mobility and forced him to “reinvent” himself, manufacturing an impressive but false genealogy that included prominent white Virginia colonists, Spaniards, and a Queen of Madagascar in his lineage. He also falsely claimed that his first wife was Native American, not African American. Handsome, learned, and well-spoken, Randolph, who purported to be a medical doctor, found his stride on the lecture circuit speaking across the United States and in Europe and the Caribbean on occult esoterica, trance mediumship, clairvoyance, sexual magic, medical potions, abolition of slavery, women’s rights, and the importance of literacy.
Read the entire piece:
https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/paschal-beverly-randolph-1825-1875/.
